The heat dissipated by today's computing equipment is reaching levels that make it challenging to cool the computing equipment in densely-packed data centers. In data centers, the computing equipment, such as a multitude of computer servers, are commonly placed in a series of racks arranged in one or more rows in the data center. Typically, the data center has a cooling system that includes, by way of example, one or more air-conditioning units. The one or more air-conditioning units provide cooled air to the electronics racks via, for example, a sub-floor or overhead plenum and associated perforated tiles or diffusers. Without a proper layout of the data center, costly inefficiencies in the cooling system inevitably occur, possibly resulting in insufficient cooling of the electronics racks.
Airflow distributions within the data center significantly impact the thermal environment of the equipment within the data center. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) calculations have been used to solve the Navier-Stokes (NS) equations, and the modeling results of the NS-CFD have been employed to thermally manage data centers. There can be, however, several potential problems with NS-CFD modeling of a data center. For example, while NS-CFD modeling has been successfully deployed for the design of very well-defined structures, such as airplane wings, the application of NS-CFD modeling to data centers can be somewhat problematic. Every data center design is different. For example, heterogeneous technology (such as computer equipment from different vendors and/or of different versions) may be used within a given data center; available data (e.g., nameplate, power and flow data) may not reflect actual usage data; and, airflow is very difficult and time-consuming to accurately measure and characterize (and may not capture room effects, such as drafts).
Additionally, the NS-CFD calculations involved are time-consuming, and may take days in order to arrive at a reasonably accurate solution, using fine grids of the data center. Because of the time-consuming nature of existing NS-CFD models, their application in optimizing a data center layout, and cooling system for the data center, is limited.